The time Edna spends in water is a suspension of space and time; this is her first attempt at realizing Robert's impermanence. In a strange way, Edna is taking her self as an object of meditation, where at the extremity of self absorption, she should be able to see through her own selflessness. "As she swam she seemed to be reaching for the unlimited in which to lose herself[emphasis added]" (Chopin 74). Edna has left her earthly existence on the shore and looked forward to a new existence, with the "unlimited", or nirvana as a tantalizing prize on the other shore. Her mistake lies in looking back.
When Edna looked back toward the shore, she notices the people she left there. She also notices that she has not covered a great distance. Then a "quick vision of death smote her soul" (Chopin 74), a sense of death that reaffirms her selfhood and reminds her of her clinging to Robert. Her meditation is broken by the wavering of her mind to other objects and senses. Her struggle to regain the shore becomes a kind of near-death experience, at the end of which comes an utter physical exhaustion, a stretching of her self's physical boundary. Edna's intellectual self, the mind, another creation of ignorance, awakens as well. She begins to "feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul" (Chopin 78).
As Edna's fortified ego emerges ashore, her attachment to Robert is strengthened. The intimate moment they share at the end of the chapter bespeaks an "acme of bliss," where "no multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire" (Chopin 63, 77).
After Edna's rebirth from the sea, her sense of self blossoms. She pulls away from the crowd and begins to do as she pleases. Léonce Pontellier's stern command for her to come inside after the swim goes unheeded. Edna realizes that her will has "blazed up, stubborn and resistant." In Buddhist philosophy, the concept of the will is one of the five aggregate that forms the self. Edna's recognition of her will is a good indication that her ego is fully formed, and that in a sense she has moved farther away from achieving nirvana. Chopin further describes Edna as "blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility" (79). The otherness of the people on Grand Isle becomes sharply defined against Edna's new vigor. Even Robert, the object of her attachment, becomes an other. When Robert claims to understand her fatigue, Edna lashes out, "You don't know anything about it. Why should you know? I never was so exhausted in my life [emphasis added]" (Chopin 75). Othering Robert, therefore objectifying him, gives rise to Edna's desire to possess him, creating suffering when the inevitable truth comes that one can't ever possess another, because there is nothing to possess.
